Spain defeated France 2-0 in the second 2026 World Cup semifinal on July 14 at Dallas Stadium (AT&T Stadium, Arlington), booking a place in Sunday's final for the first time since 2010. Mikel Oyarzabal converted a 22nd-minute penalty after Lamine Yamal was fouled in the box, and Pedro Porro doubled the lead in the 58th minute finishing off a move built by Dani Olmo Al Jazeera.

The result ended France's bid for a third straight final and closed out a run in which Kylian Mbappe's side had gone unbeaten through its first six matches of the tournament, scoring 16 goals along the way. It was also Spain's sixth clean sheet of the campaign, a defensive record that has quietly underwritten a tournament run built as much on containment as on the attacking talent of Yamal, Olmo and company.

Spain now waits at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on Sunday, July 19, at 19:00 GMT, for the winner of the second semifinal: England against Argentina, kicking off Wednesday, July 15, at 19:00 GMT (3:00 p.m. ET) at Atlanta Stadium. That match carries the FIFA designation Match 102 Fox Sports, and the final itself is Match 101 in FIFA's official schedule FIFA — a numbering quirk of a bracket that runs the final before the third-place playoff in sequence even though it kicks off later in the calendar.

The Opta supercomputer gives England a 51.9% chance of advancing past Argentina, effectively a coin flip dressed in decimal precision Al Jazeera. Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham have each scored six goals this tournament, making them the first pair of teammates from the same nation to reach that mark in a single World Cup. Argentina arrives as the tournament's highest-scoring team with 17 goals, one short of the nation's all-time record for a single campaign, with Lionel Messi leading the overall Golden Boot race on eight goals.

Whichever side loses Wednesday's semifinal meets France in the third-place match on Saturday, July 18, at 22:00 GMT at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens — a fixture that, for all its reputation as a dead rubber, will settle whether France's tournament ends with a podium finish or empty-handed after such a dominant group and knockout run up to the semifinal.

The stakes in Wednesday's semifinal are asymmetric in a way the Opta number doesn't fully capture. England has never won a men's World Cup outside 1966, and a Kane-Bellingham generation that has now matched a joint national scoring feat carries different historical weight into a final than an Argentina side chasing back-to-back titles under a Messi still adding to his career World Cup goal tally at 8 goals this tournament. Records within records tend to accumulate at this stage of a tournament, and the goal-count storylines — Argentina's proximity to its scoring record, Messi's Golden Boot lead, the Kane-Bellingham milestone — are the kind of statistical threads that only resolve definitively once the bracket does.

Spain's route to the final has been notably light on goals conceded relative to goals created, a profile that contrasts with the France side it just eliminated, which had leaned on Mbappe's scoring output and an unbeaten run to reach the last four. That France, unbeaten through six matches and averaging better than 2.6 goals per game, lost by two clean goals to a side playing a more patient, penalty-and-buildup style says something about how differently teams can arrive at the same stage of a tournament — and how little the group-stage form guide sometimes tells you about knockout outcomes.

One scheduling detail worth noting for anyone tracking venue nomenclature: FIFA's official match listings refer to the Arlington, Texas venue that hosted the Spain-France semifinal as "Dallas Stadium," its World Cup-specific naming convention for AT&T Stadium FIFA. The same convention applies elsewhere in the bracket — Kansas City Stadium is set to have hosted a quarter-final under similar rebranding — a reminder that FIFA's official records and broadcast maps don't always match the commercial stadium names fans know.

With the final field down to three possible finalists and one already locked in, the tournament now moves into its final week: a semifinal Wednesday, a third-place match Saturday, and the final itself on Sunday at MetLife Stadium. Spain will have nearly a week to prepare for whichever opponent emerges from Atlanta, while England and Argentina play for a place in a final against a Spanish side that has conceded almost nothing this tournament and now has five days' rest before the biggest match of the cycle.